There is no They.

Myth

May 20, 2013

This blog (when I can post) frequently focuses on social organization and the ways people are trying to adapt to changing times, especially as the nation-state and other traditional institutions lose their old sway.

So I'm overdue to delve into one that's stuck with me for some time: the phyles from Neil Stephenson's fascinating (though massively flawed on several levels) novel The Diamond Age. Phyles are cultural groupings powerful enough to largely replace nation-states. Despite being in an ostensibly post-national era, the Phyles largely break down on old lines (China, India, Japan), with some throwbacks like Maoists or Stephenson's BFFs, the Neo-Victorians.

Naturally enough, the actual workings of the phyles are largely in the background (this is a novel, after all, not a social treatise, and is usually awful when it stumbles in that direction), but as shorthand for "socioeconomic group that could supplant aspects of nations" it's useful for the following thought exercise.

March 26, 2013

On an unusually cold March morning 92 years ago, thousands of Red Army soldiers left solid ground and charged across five miles of heavy ice to the fortress city of Kronstadt.

The citadel was held by the rebellious sailors of the Baltic Fleet, formerly the shock troop zealots of the revolution. During the 1917 uprisings, they'd executed their officers en masse and remained one of the Bolshevik's most reliable military forces.

But as Lenin and his crew centralized their power and became increasingly repressive, the sailors turned against them. They seized the fleet and issued their own manifestoes, declaring that "the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window."

The sailors were experienced fighters in a formidable position: they cut the Red Army down. Over 10,000 soldiers died during 10 days of fighting. But in the end, the government crushed the uprising. They finished devastating Kronstadt just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, destroyed by the troops of the fledgling French Third Republic.

In 1794, the leaders of the American Revolution called up their forces once again, this time to end a guerilla rebellion rather than start one. Western farmers had taken up arms rather than pay the whiskey tax that was part of Alexander Hamilton's plan to get the nascent national economy up and running without pissing off his mercantile allies too much. So President George Washington marched west at the head of 13,000 soldiers. There was no major bloodshed, but the message was completely clear: rise up and we'll destroy you.

There's a mythology around popular revolution, one that informs what kind of politics we revere, that even determines what we consider possible in our wildest dreams.

This is its uncomfortable catalogue of heresies, an alternate timeline running parallel to the shinier canon of July 4, the storming of the Bastille, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. The same process happens across cultures, after violent revolutions and peaceful ones, perpetrated by regimes both tyrannical and democratic. Every time the troops crest the barricades, it poses a dirty little question: why do revolutions, based on the principle that rebellion is justified, end up ruthlessly ending rebellions?

But there's something else worth highlighting, and the speech above is a really good example. It's the end of "We Shall Overcome," an incredibly powerful few minutes. Almost lost in the applause, you can hear King giving the rapturous crowd instructions.

He's telling them to attend a meeting. After the heights of this speech, it seems an absolutely mundane thing to do. "That's why we're fighting for a more moral universe against all odds. Meet me in the fellowship hall in 10 minutes." Not a call to find themselves, not pulling them towards vague evolution, King wanted a concrete, immediate action. The rhetoric's important, but it's that combination that made the civil rights movement work.

January 18, 2013

Fascinating piece from Alex Klein on the looming schism in Scientology, specifically over a real-estate scam involving the construction of its "Ideal Org" local headquarters:

But inside the church, the Ideal Orgs are sparking insurrection. Across the country, donors and high-ranking executives say that the aggressive fundraising and construction scheme is used to enrich the central church at the expense of the rank and file, helping to grow the Scientology war chest to over a billion dollars. Two former members, Mike Rinder and Mark Elliott, went so far as to call the project a "real estate scam." To some of these defectors, the structures are metaphors for the religion itself: garish on the outside, empty on the inside. The irony is that the very expansion that Scientology lauds as its renaissance is actually a symbol of internal dissent and decline.

One of the most interesting parts of the article is the dissidents' repeated references to L. Ron Hubbard's intent or original teachings. While some who've split from Scientology have ditched the whole thing, others have set up their own splinter groups.

That's a natural reaction. If people are attracted to a set of ideals and then the institution that supposedly represents them becomes corrupt or goes in a different direction, it's psychologically easier to find that the original goals were betrayed by the current leadership rather than abandon the whole structure.

The process of schism has happened in every creed from Christianity to Marxism, but this is a fascinating up-close glimpse at how it plays out. Hubbard's still within living memory, and people are already sharply disagreeing over what his intent really was. It's easy to see "Scientologists" in a century encompassing all swaths of ideologies.

This also highlights that arguing over whether a given creed, especially a large and old one, is good or evil somewhat misses the point. On a long enough timeline, multiplying sects will use the same founding mythology to justify every position.

November 28, 2012

The
Breaking Time is really just the continual state of the
post-Lapsarian
condition. Everything we are and everything we do is a result of the
Fall of Man, and that Fall makes itself evident in everything we
ourselves create. All decay, all rot, all moral failures and
lawlessness, all attempts by mad to trespass into God's domain with
works like artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetic
manipulation are just the side-effects of humanity's experience and
expression of evil; today is God's Judgment.

This
is what I would tell you if I were a fundamentalist Christian-- that
we are all sinful in some basic fashion (because of some basic
action), and that nature has infected everything we do. But I'm not a
fundamentalist Christian, so let's try something else.

The
Breaking Time is just the precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and
the fulfilling of YHVH's ultimate covenant with Man. We must strive
through, as best we can but also spur on progress toward the time
when this Messiah will make itself known. As such, we tolerate
lawlessness, immorality, and decay, as we know that it will bring us
closer to the time of Messianic Fruition.

No?
Okay, how about this:

That
which we call "evil" is really just the effect of the
workings of evolutionary biological processes, selfishness,
procreative need, tribalism, and the insular nature of the preferred
size of human social groups. The only thing that exists which can
rightly be called "evil" are those forces of ignorance
which lead us away from inquiry and scientific understanding, and
those forces must, indeed, be stamped out and shown as false, broken,
harmful, and dangerous, at all costs. Only then will the true nature
of the universe be able to be known, free of antiquated moralising
and repression.

What
about this: The return of Maitreya has meant that there will be a
world-wide awakening of consciousness, and His work must be helped
along by those willing to make the world over in fire, and who are
willing to do whatever it takes to survive these end times.

If
you don't see your particular flavor of armageddon above I could go
on, if you'd like.

November 09, 2012

It's my pleasure to welcome m1k3y to the Breaking Time. Our longtime readers might remember him from our comrades in future dissection, Grinding, and as the other side of the Grinder Dialogues from this site's early days. Here he brings us an energetic, eclectic look at the roots of "normal."

Are you a wizard? Seriously, this is a legitimate question. I recently finished reading Alan Moore's incredible, highly mythic comic series Promethea, and it concludes with a very simple message: all we have ever done is sit by some evolution of the campfire — television is just the latest progression — and tell each other stories, literallyimagining the world into existence. Unless you've only sat there passively spellbound, you've been a wizard your whole life, from the moment you mastered the first art, the first technology: language.

Our lives are constructed from language, and the words we use matter. One of these most powerful, spelt, words is Normal.

Mr. Forbes' powerfully simple axiom, the tagline for this blog, is "There is no They." Last year, as part of our ongoing dialog, I took the liberty of extending it, to what I dubbed its first corollary: There is no Normal.

What is normal? What makes it a word of power? It's that subject that I seek to explore here, in what will be an occasional series of posts examining this subject from a variety of angles. Today, we start with pharmacology and history.

October 30, 2012

A few interesting concepts and tidbits that I've found more about on Wikipedia. This is one advantage to a crowd-sourced encyclopedia: after awhile, it gets into the nooks and crannies of human knowledge.

• Damnatio memoriae — The strangely enduring concept that a person can be erased from history. Pursued by almost every civilization in some form, from Romans striking faces off mosaics to Stalin's comrades disappearing one by one, becoming, in Orwell's words, "unpersons." Widely considered impossible in eras of much more widespread documentation.

But with more media becoming electronic however, this paradoxically might become easier. Ironically, a version of Orwell's works recently disappeared from Kindle.

• King in the Mountain — Once upon a time, we had a leader who led us to victory against the odds, with more to come. Then a tragedy happened. But the leader was too great to die, we know that (somehow).

The leader must be sleeping, somewhere, waiting. Someday they will come back. The good times will come again, and everything since reduced to a bad dream, a footnote in a golden age.

• Terminus — In Latin: "boundary stone." Sooner or later everything ends. Every country has its border, every life its final day (unless they're sleeping under a mountain, naturally). The Romans were bright enough to turn this into a god. It's the basis of every tragedy (everyone reaches their limits) and every sense of relief (this will eventually end)

The original name of Atlanta was Terminus, and in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Terminus is a planet that serves as the final refuge of humanity's knowledge in the face of a dark age. For awhile, anyway.

September 21, 2012

I'm heading out to the woods for some birthday R&R. This week's been excellent on both the traffic and discussion fronts, and I'm happy to see the Breaking Time grow on a number of fronts. I can't thank all of you enough.

To close out the week, here's this amazing, epic poem from Linda Hogan:

September 19, 2012

It's Talk Like a Pirate Day, where people worldwide are encouraged to imitate a bundle of behaviors and accompanying accent popularized by English actor Robert Newton (thanks for that bit of info, Josh Ellis).

"I am sorry they won't let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?"

That's Captain "Black Sam" Bellamy, quoted by Daniel Defoe, ranting at the captain of one of his prizes. A brilliant raider, he was one of the originators of the Jolly Roger, capturing slave ships and assembling his own fleet. Also, given that he was elected to his spot by a gang of fierce raiders assembled from all corners of the globe, Bellamy had to be pretty damn cunning.

Say what you will about piracy, the man had dash:

"I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and thismyconscience tells me! But there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure."

September 07, 2012

I just got back from covering the Democratic National Convention. Got some great material and fascinating interviews, which I hope to roll out next week.

In the meantime, I plan to sleep for an age. Here's a classic from Richard Wilbur (a tip o' the hat to Martin Ramsey for the recommendation):

A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.
The rare original heartsbleed goes,
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,
Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies.
Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate lawn,
The haggard daylight steer.